The Therapeutic Community As an Adaptable Treatment Modality Across Different Settings

P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002 Psychiatric Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3, Fall 2004 (C 2004) THE THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY AS AN ADAPTABLE TREATMENT MODALITY ACROSS DIFFERENT SETTINGS David Kennard Simple core statements of the therapeutic community as a treatment modality are given, including a “living-learning situation” and “culture of enquiry.” Applications are described in work with children and adolescents, chronic and acute psychoses, offenders, and learning disabilities. In each area the evolu- tion of different therapeutic community models is outlined. In work with young people the work of Homer Lane and David Wills is highlighted. For long term psychosis services, the early influence of “moral treatment” is linked to the revitalisation of asylums and the creation of community based facilities; acute psychosis services have been have been run as therapeutic communities in both hospital wards and as alternatives to hospitalisation. Applications in prison are illustrated through an account of Grendon prison. The paper also outlines the geographical spread of therapeutic communities across many countries. KEY WORDS: therapeutic communities; children; psychosis; prison; learning disability. The author is Head of Psychological Services, The Retreat, York, England. Address correspondence to David Kennard, The Retreat, York, YO10 5BN, United Kingdom; e-mail: [email protected]. 295 0033-2720/04/0900-0295/0 C 2004 Human Sciences Press, Inc. P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002 296 PSYCHIATRIC QUARTERLY This is a paper about different adaptations of the basic therapeutic community idea. A detailed account of the principles and practice of therapeutic communities associated with the work of Maxwell Jones (1) and Tom Main (2) is given elsewhere. For our purpose it may help to have in mind a few simple core statements that mark out the com- mon ground of this treatment modality, but which allow for the vari- ations found in applications in different settings and with different populations. “What distinguishes a therapeutic community from other compa- rable treatment centres is the way in which the institution’s total resources, staff, patients, and their relatives, are self-consciously pooled in furthering treatment. That implies, above all, a change in the usual status of patients” (1, pp. 85–86). The therapeutic community is a “living-learning situation” where everything that happens between members (staff and patients) in the course of living and working together, in particular when a crisis occurs, is used as a learning opportunity. Permissiveness is one of the four principles identified by Rapoport (3) and is perhaps the most central of the four: that all members should tolerate from one another a wide degree of behaviour that might be distressing or seem deviant by ordinary standards. There is a “culture of enquiry,” a phrase that highlights the need not only for efficient structures but for a basic culture among the staff of “honest enquiry into difficulty,” and a conscious effort to identify and challenge dogmatic assertions or accepted wisdoms. The basic mechanism of change can be described as this: the therapeutic community provides a wide range of life-like situations in which the difficulties a member has experienced in their relations with others outside are reexperienced and reenacted, with regu- lar opportunities—in groups, community meetings, everyday relationships and, in some communities, individual psychotherapy—to examine and learn from these difficulties. The daily life of the therapeutic community provides opportunities to try out new learning about ways of dealing with difficulties. CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS Therapeutic communities for children and young people go back at least 90 years, to the founding of the Little Commonwealth by Homer Lane in 1913. Lane was an American who had experience as an educator at the George Junior Republic, a reformatory system developed in the P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002 DAVID KENNARD 297 United States, and was invited to advise on the setting up of a home for delinquent adolescents in Dorset in south west England. For 5 years the Little Commonwealth housed around 50 youngsters, mostly aged 14–19, who participated in a carefully structured system of shared responsibility. Lane wrote that the chief point of difference between the Commonwealth and other reformatories and schools is that in the Commonwealth there are no rules and regulations except those made by the boys and girls themselves. All those who are fourteen years of age and over are citizens, having joint responsibility for the regulation of their lives by the laws and judicial machinery organized and developed by themselves. The adult element studiously avoids any assumption of authority in the community, except in connection with their duties as teachers or as supervisors of labour. (The individual and the whole community are free) to make mistakes, to test for themselves the value of every law and the necessity for every restraint imposed on them (4). This remarkable venture ran for 5 years but came to a premature end after two young female “citizens” claimed that Lane, who had become an enthusiastic proponent of psychoanalysis and was attempting to apply it in the community, had immoral relations with them. However his innovative work inspired the educational pioneer A S Neill who founded Summerhill, and who in turn influenced the whole progressive school movement. The term therapeutic community was not applied directly to residential work with children until the 1960s. However from the 1920s onwards a number of residential schools and projects for seriously dis- turbed or “unschoolable” children, which had many of the key fea- tures of therapeutic communities, were created by charismatic figures. These included Leila Rendell (Caldecott Community), George Lyward (Finchden Manor), Otto Shaw (Red Hill School), John Aitkenhead (Kilquhanity School), and the hugely influential Marjorie Franklin and David Wills, whose 1930s Hawkspur Camp laid the foundation for Planned Environment Therapy, described by Kasinski (5) as “probably the first unified model for the therapeutic community work with young people.” In his recent review of the history of therapeutic communities for young people, Kasinski (5) writes that “Planned Environment Therapy proposed that the child’s social needs could be addressed through the experience of shared responsibility within the community; their emo- tional needs through attention to relationships with staff members and through individual psychotherapy; and their educational needs through measures designed to increase motivation for learning such as volun- tary lesions and an emphasis on creative work.” P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002 298 PSYCHIATRIC QUARTERLY Wills shared Lane’s belief in the therapeutic value of love combined with shared responsibility. Love in this context meant that no matter how repelling a child’s appearance, habits or disposition he or she was seen as basically worthy of esteem and affection, and punishment was never to be used to inflict hurt or humiliation. Unlike Lane, Wills sep- arated the environmental and the psychoanalytic aspects of the therapeutic work, thereby creating a more contained and sustainable way of working. For many establishments this became the accepted model, while others developed a model that used the relationships within the large group as the therapeutic focus Therapeutic communities today can draw on the full range of knowl- edge and theories available about emotionally deprived and abused children from Winnicott, Rutter, Alvarez, Bowlby and Bettelheim, as well as the models for adult therapeutic communities. They have developed ways of working that aim to provide the vital balance between the need for care and the need for control, between offering love and affection and setting limits. A recent issue of the journal Therapeutic Communities was devoted to papers on this topic. Rollinson, director of the Mulberry Bush School, described this as “real living and learning in the therapeutic community (where) so much of the work is in the “living alongside” the children, focussing on helping individuals and groups to learn to live with themselves and increasingly with one another” (6). The publication in 2003 of Therapeutic Communities for Children and Adolescents (7) provides further indication of the current conceptual and practical activity in this field in the UK, where The Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities also has an informative website at www.charterhousegroup.org.uk. THE THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY APPROACH FOR PEOPLE WITH LONG-TERM PSYCHOSIS The application of therapeutic community principles to work with the chronic mentally ill is in many ways the closest version of the therapeutic community modality to one of its most important predecessors, Moral Treatment. This was the term used to describe a model of care first developed in 1796 by the Quaker William Tuke at The Retreat in York. In keeping with Quaker ideology, the mentally ill were accorded the status of equal human beings to be treated with gentleness, humanity and respect. This was quite revolutionary at the time, and The Retreat also gave priority to the value of personal relationships as a healing P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002 DAVID KENNARD 299 influence, to the importance of useful occupation, and to the quality of the physical environment (8,9). Much of this early vision of a humane treatment for mental illness was lost as the 19th century progressed and the mentally ill were housed in increasingly large and impersonal asylums. Although the first half of the 20th century saw some attempts to humanize these institutions, it was not until the 1950s that the zeit- geist for the mentally ill began to change.

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